Recent news from The Johns Hopkins University

This section contains regularly updated highlights of the news from around The Johns Hopkins
University. Links to the complete news reports from the nine schools,
the Applied Physics Laboratory and other centers and institutes are to
the left, as are links to help news media contact the Johns Hopkins
communications offices.

Once-formidable disparities between black and white families living in subsidized housing have largely vanished, and black and white children who grew up in such housing fared similarly in school, jobs and earnings, finds a new Johns Hopkins University study. However, one troubling difference remains between black and white families in assisted housing — neighborhood quality. Black families getting subsidized housing are about nine time more likely than whites to live in segregated, impoverished neighborhoods, the study found.

Living in subsidized housing seems to give a boost to children with high standardized test scores and few behavior problems, but it has the opposite effect on students who score poorly and have behavioral issues, a new study finds.

In a study recently published in the journal Real Estate Economics, public policy professor Sandra J. Newman and researcher C. Scott Holupka found that race was a key determinate of which low and moderate-income people who bought first homes during the decade made money. During the Great Recession, white homebuyers lost money but black ones lost considerably more. Even during the boom years, when white buyers increased their wealth by 50 percent, black buyers lost 47 percent of their wealth.

It’s long been accepted – with little science to back it up – that people should spend roughly a third of their income on housing. It turns out, that’s about how much a low-income family should spend to optimize their children’s brainpower.